What the myth of revenge tells us about terrorism, refugees and reverence

A man holds his crying child close to him as migrants force their way through police lines at Tovarnik station for a train to take them to Zagreb on Sept. 17, 2015 in Tovarnik, Croatia. (Jeff J. Mitchell, Getty Images)

I will not here be discussing the fear-mongering against refugees by too many politicians. Nor will I be entering the debate about how to respond to Daesh — the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). There must be strong response, yet the drift towards closed borders and greater war is ominous.

I want to instead contrast two attitudes involved in response to terror and to refugees. Actually, they are far more than “attitudes” — they are deep passions and foundational forces in human life. And while discussing such passions may seem abstract, I suggest that even in the short term they are crucial for the adequacy or failure of our responses.

Reverence is the first of these passions, and revenge the second.

Reverence, I learned from one of my wisest teachers, “is the womb of nobility” — the womb of real justice and peace. Later, another wise teacher showed me what Aeschylus taught about the implacable furies of revenge. His Oresteia, 2500 years ago, enacted the literally endless and continually tragic cycle fueled by revenge. Yet it simultaneously celebrated the birth in Athens of the wisdom (and nobility) of seeking justice through law, courts, and difficult human agreement — a birth conceived in reverence for Athena and brought to fruition at least to some degree in any decently human city.

Given the headlines, these platitudes may just seem academic trivia. Yet the Oresteia remains among the greatest achievements of the Western thought and imagination. And not just in some “artsy” way. It still shows us both the depth of our hunger for revenge, and the tragic folly of satisfying that hunger.

Migrants make their way through Serbia, near the town of Subotica, Serbia, towards a break in the steel and razor fence erected on the border by the Hungarian government on Sept. 9, 2015. Thousands of migrants have funneled their way across country to the small gap in the steel fence unopposed by the authorities. Since the beginning of 2015 the number of migrants using the so-called ‘Balkans route’ has exploded with migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey and then travelling on through Macedonia and Serbia before entering the EU via Hungary. (Christopher Furlong, Getty Images)

Revenge has always been a central theme in our stories because it is pervasive in our human history and again today in our lives. Ours have typically been “mythic” stories about heroic and even salvific revenge — the good guys destroying the evil. Yet Aeschylus begins where such myths end by challenging us to think about what happens next, about the inevitable return of the furies unless the cycle is finally broken by something other than revenge.

And there has of late been a very dangerous (but quite satisfying) escalation in the telling of the popular myth. Revenge was central to the old westerns and war movies, yet somehow it remained within larger contexts of order and community. Gary Cooper and even John Wayne set the tone — yes, killing the bad guys and saving the damsel, but with some hesitant circumspection and even a wry civility.

Lately, however, the story of heroic revenge has paid scant attention to civility and given itself almost unreservedly to fury, to naked celebration of terrific and “cleansing” violence. Now the hero (gals as well as guys) gets hit and hurt by the simplistically stereotyped faces of evil. She or he is often down, but never out. She or he constantly punches back in an escalating drumbeat of anger and vengeance culminating in some final pyrotechnic massacre. Again and again, on big screen and little, we are fed this grotesque celebration of the supposedly healing myth of revenge.

Of course it’s all silly nonsense — as anyone who’s actually been there can tell you. But it makes millions for the media and gives its audience quick thrills and cheap catharsis. All gone by morning. It is, after all, just entertainment.

But is it “just entertainment”? Or does it entertain by stoking a deep fire that burns perennially in the human heart. And it’s not just the jihadists who have been so stirred by the furies. We too, perhaps as much as they, have fed on the same myth. We too, or so I fear, at some level also want to give ourselves over to such furious lust.

What, then, of reverence?

Migrants from Pakistan land on shore after completing a journey in a small dinghy crossing a three mile stretch of the Aegean Sea from Turkey on Aug. 31, 2015 in Kos, Greece. Migrants from many parts of the Middle East and African nations continue to flood into Europe before heading from Athens, north to the Macedonian border. (Dan Kitwood, Getty Images)

My belief is that reverence was — in Athens and elsewhere — and must now again be the root force or passion which tames such fury by trusting a fundamentally different way to justice. Nor was it just Aeschylus who so taught us. The Buddha too, at about the same time, taught that compassion flowers from a matrix of reverence. And Jesus, Christians believe, was the incarnate presence of God’s mercy. He taught and even commanded us to love even very real enemies — something we can attempt only when we live out of reverence for God’s Kingdom.

We have a long tradition of teachers and other witnesses to the transforming power of reverence — a tradition which still echoes in our hearts and finds expression in our stories.
So it happened, as if by accident, that while writing this essay I caught a TV re-run of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, that magnificent 1960s evocation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Both plays are compelling dramatizations of the tragic folly of revenge. But both story and stage in Bernstein’s play (as somewhat in Shakespeare’s, if memory serves) are illumined by a backlight glow of reverence. It shines through the basic story of young love’s joy and innocence. It breaks out in the celebratory song and dance of Puerto Rican immigrant families. It is even present as compassionate sadness in the escalating downbeats of racial fear and hatred, and eventually of revenge.

Bernstein’s final scene directly evokes Michelangelo’s Pieta as the kneeling young Maria enfolds the body of her beloved. This is not “just entertainment.” This is the thought and imagination of great art. It can give us, if we open our hearts, a catharsis grown from reverence and painful enough to again put revenge to shame.

I believe that today’s refugees could evoke a similar sense of reverence if we pay sufficient attention. I see reverence animating the images of welcoming relief workers at every stage of their exodus. And I feel it even more from the fearful, anxious, yet uplifted faces of women and men, children and elders, fleeing terror and asking help.

We must find ways to respond to terrorists. But our response may escape the damming cycle of revenge if a deeper sense of reverence governs deliberation and action. And it is just possible that really seeing and then responding (however we can) to today’s refugees will again awaken our fundamental sense of reverence.

These ideas, I repeat, probably seem abstract and quite distant from news of pressing realities. Yet reverence nonetheless remains the womb of human nobility, the most reliable ground for response to those realities.

John Kane has been a professor of Religious Studies at Regis University since 1980. He was Chairperson of the Religious Studies Department and has focused on inter-faith dialogue, justice and peace initiatives and reform within the Catholic Church.

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